sure is that so much of it which of course you want it. to be would be the first direct encounter between president obama and republican challenger mitt romney left the incumbent you feel like roadkill. for the first time in the history of wal-mart workers are walking out of their jobs and into a new battle fighting for improved working conditions but as temporary non union employees who work for one of the largest and most powerful companies in the world will this battle be all uphill r.t. had to the picket just find out. if you were to hear injured. in a magician suit would be hard to curtain came out having first shredded the ballots

one would you trust that process in the land of free and fair elections not all ballots are treated the same a system full of old technology and a faulty paper trail have put a dark cloud over the way voting is conducted in many parts of this country so with the presidential elections right around the corner we'll take a quick critical look at the process. plus one presidential debate down two to go some voters say they can't wait for the pageantry and the punditry to and some even say the twenty five twelve election is shaping up to be a snooze fest so we'll head to the streets of new york city for a wake up call. it is friday october fifth four pm in washington d.c. i'm christine frizz out and you're watching our t.v. . we want to begin with

a story that's been picking up steam over the last few days involving one of the largest most powerful companies in this country really in the world we're talking about wal-mart. you want to grab a thread to what happens if she does find a lower advertised price somewhere else i'll match her a here so what you learn today every dollar counts and i get to bring more home to my family that's the walmart low price guarantees see for yourself how much you can save you. so wal-mart logo is save money live better but according to many wal-mart employees is something that might apply to customers but does not apply to them so they're speaking out against what they call horrendous working conditions but when they did here's what happened. so that is the pastor who came out to support the workers in their active suit civil disobedience you can see he's being arrested now if you take

a look you can also see several members of the swat team are there as well now this is just one of several protests that have been staged during the last week involving people who work for wal-mart some contractors they want often doing their jobs have joined the picket lines and here's what workers are asking for in a nutshell better working conditions many of them say they work in extreme temperatures some even say things like shin pads and dust mats masks could make their lives a whole lot easier they say they'd like the hours they were told they'd get and they'd like to know that if they do speak out that they won't be retaliated against right now that is not the case and remember these are not union workers so many of them are temporary workers which means they make low wages they have no benefits and in many cases are put in dangerous working environments to speak more about this i'm joined by our window he spent the morning with some of these disgruntled workers ramona just to be clear these are not the employees the ones that you see when you walk into wal-mart with the blue vests to greet you we're talking about

those who do sort of more manual labor right. sure well we have employees in several categories the video that we saw there in illinois involves warehouse employees that are contracted to companies who work with wal-mart but what that protest that we saw in illinois comes right on the heels of a similar warehouse protest that we saw here in southern california where workers walked off the job and went on strike for an entire week marching from riverside all the way to los angeles demanding these fair rights and really these demonstrators straightens go back several weeks here in southern california where workers and other unions have shown solidarity with these warehouse worker unions trying to let wal-mart know that they're tired of working under these conditions which they consider to be just inhumane now if you want to say we reached out to

wal-mart we also reached out to some of these subcontractors and right now that the reaction that we've gotten mostly over the phone is no comment i know ramon you were able to speak to some of these workers what are they telling you that's right was i mentioned a strike here in southern california most a warehouse workers did recently and yet some of them when they say that they returned to work their concerns over safety were not they were not met and we're hearing some of the same problems from people actually working inside of the retail stores now so a lot of them talked about just the lack of benefits and the low wages that really makes it difficult for them to survive and to feed their families some of the people that we talked to today though told us that these sort of actions that we've been seeing around the country have really emboldened some of them to really organizing come together. i think we feel like we don't have a place we don't have

a voice and wal-mart and i mean we have nothing and i feel that by a standing strong and being who we are we are a huge family organization as a family it's not just people stand up for the right it's a family stand up for the right you know me and almost. like we were slaves is basically the bottom line we are still. good. and for them to step up. no union organizers and other community leaders have. collective signatures you know against wal-mart hoping to encourage other workers to unionize but so far wal-mart has been very resistant to any efforts and some of these workers say that they've even been we tell you that against for trying to unionize in their own stores well certainly it's no secret ramon that wal-mart is not in favor of unions there's been a number of cases and i think we have some video of a protest from last year back in march of two thousand and eleven video during the

whole wal-mart versus dukes supreme court case this was discrimination case a lot of women who work for wal-mart they say that you know they were discriminated against and the u.s. supreme court sided with wal-mart in this gender discrimination suit another example though in canada workers at a quebec store tried to form a union and what did wal-mart do will they close that store and they later just opened a new one not too far away. ramon here's here's the deal i mean it seems that wal-mart is sort of the all powerful company. and what they say and it's hard to argue with this is that if they have to you know pay union wages if they have to update their stores you know and all the working conditions that they're not going to be able to pass those low price savings to all the customers but what do you think ramona in your research i mean is there a middle ground here. no you know that's the argument made very commonly that if they do pay their workers more they would have to raise prices but the issue here

that many of these employees want to point out is that the same sort of value that they're trying to pass on to their customers they really don't treat their employees with that sort of value and also they want to point out that in their view that opening up of these mega stores in places like downtown los angeles is going to really hurt the local economy and the local businesses. and really even though it does seem like an uphill battle as you mentioned while wal-mart does have quite a bit of political clout that doesn't have deterred any of these people who are trying to organize and who are continuing to plan several demonstrations throughout the fall and throughout the winter knowing that wal-mart's big season is the holiday season they want to defend people know what is going on behind those doors absolutely really interesting i did a story recently ramon about grocery stores in america was was shocked to find out

that the second most frequented place for groceries shopping for americans is actually these wal-mart supercenter so really interesting what's going on you keeping your eyes out there for us r.t. correspondent rym uncle and joe things all right everyone were less than five weeks away from election day and you know most of us when we go to the polls will vote on a touch screen voting machine we finish up and we leave with no receipt no proof that who we voted for is counted so we can we take a look at the election system from a technology standpoint and ask this question how free and how fair our elections are to correspond on a saucy a chair going to take a deeper look. the u.s. a beacon of democracy and an example to be followed by the rest of the world one big source of pride is its fundamental concept of free and fair elections american elections are a disgrace it's like looking into the kitchen of a first class restaurant and losing an appetite at what you see because we have an

election system a voting system that is completely nontransparent an opinion shared by many political experts and educators if you were to hair. in a magician suit and went behind a curtain came out having first read the ballots to tell you who won would you trust that process and that process largely to blame is the outdated outrunning voting system in the states where all they have this electronic voting it could be a real problem. if you don't have some other type of backup source to verify the vote count. it could be a problem read friedman is an independent award winning blogger who has covered the u.s. election system for years he calls the problem a pandemic and says change is long overdue every single state in the union uses electronic voting a third of the voters this year will vote on one hundred percent on verifiable

touch screen voting systems electronic voting systems. the rest of the country by and large will vote on paper ballots but those paper ballots are also counted by electronic systems unless you can see inside a computer there's no way to know if those computers tallied those ballots correctly several experiments conducted on electronic voting machines have proven that simple keystrokes and some knowledge of science and computers could flip results the circuitry inside the machine would clear the incorrect in numbers insert the correct in numbers experts say the accuracy of the vote count even with paper trail is a myth in the ninety nine percent plus percent of the cases those ballots never see the light of day or never examined never recounted basically american elections at this point have virtually zero claim on public confidence and which intimacy the rules and specific ations of how lections are held very locally and state by state

four thousand different counties each of them use a different type of system a different type of voting system each of them have different flaws different vulnerabilities one particular company that makes electronic voting machines in the us has earned a dubious reputation for unverifiable results as records vanish into thin air i go to an a.t.m. and it's a double machine i get a confirmation slip and i go around the corner to vote and i you know make my vote and there's no record of people don't other voting machine production companies are also known to have strong partisan affiliations they are not accountable to any voters. they are not just private but but private and extreme in their political sympathies democrats don't actually win that many elections to be precise democrats almost never win close elections. and the trick therefore is to see to it that a race is or looks close improving the election process in this digital age doesn't appear to be on anyone's agenda and putting barack obama's our president who won't

talk ever about election fraud and denies that it has ever happened in even when you know members of his own party have been the victims of it and while the number of reported flaws grows with each passing election over the past decade since two thousand when i think congress was pretending to want to make things better what has happened is things have gotten much much worse it appears stealing an election in the us may be a candidate certain way to secure and when it's easy as one two three in this digital age of smartphones tablets and satellite navigation systems american voters will head to the polls this november to cast their ballots using antiquated and unreliable voting machines machines that will ultimately determine who will lead this nation in much need of its own repairs and as they say pretty new york. all right everyone this warrants a much deeper discussion i mean as honest as i said we're in the age of i pads you

can d.v.r. programs from your cell phone surely there should be a better more technologically sound way to vote but as of now there is not so we want to talk about both the specifics of why not and also the bigger picture here howard university political science professor wilmer leon is here and also the head of the vulnerability asset team at argonne national lab roger johnston thanks fellas for being here professor let me start with you why why is this the case today that the technology is outdated that people can't get a record of who they voted for well i think we do have the technology available to to make this very simple receipts other types of digital documentation in terms of the vote that is cast but one of the from a policy perspective i think one of the big misnomers that people have in this country is that we have a national election we really don't we have fifty different state elections plus

the american protectorates such as puerto rico and the virgin islands and whatnot so with that then state law tends to dictate what apparatus is or what technologies are going to be used in particular states instead of there being federal standards in federal oversight it's left up to the states this was one of the things in terms of the federalism process or type of government that we have where power is left with the states. that's one of the areas that the states still have control over yeah it's so interesting i was at the republican national convention recently and the primary process is the same way every state is different and i think that confuses a whole lot of people and makes the process much more difficult absolutely roger i know last year your organization came out with some results from a study computer science and security experts at argonne found some of these machines especially these deeble machines could be hacked into changing the results talk a little bit about the findings and if anything's been done since this information

came out. well our view is that people previously looking at the security of voting machines had largely been computer scientists cyber hackers and while we agreed that the attacks they demonstrated were certainly viable we thought there were simpler attacks attacks that are harder to spot and attacks that are potentially even more difficult to deal with so we demonstrated on a couple different kinds of voting machines this. physical type of attack which in principle is actually takes less skill than than some of the cyber attacks. yeah really interesting and as honest os and mention as most of the most of you know at home most machines that are used are these deep old machines now public records have shown this for years that this company old has given hundreds of thousands maybe even millions of dollars at this point to conservative candidates and causes these are machines used by a third of voters what do you think the president and i mean is it possible that

there's a conflict of interest here oh there is it's not possible there is a conflict of interest in fact it's not only a matter of cyber hacking it's a matter of machines arriving at the polling place with thousands of votes already loaded in them before the polls even open and then we also have that more christian miller could have spoken to this we have a letter from the president of the bold to the secretary of state at the time of ohio stating that they will do everything in their power to prove to. provide for the election going to the republican candidate that was in two thousand or two thousand and four two thousand and four i think in two thousand and four so what is there evidence that these machines show up with with thousands of votes already in then you only with the poll workers go to the poll and it turn the machine on and the machine has fifty thousand votes already registered in it. that's evidence that's the machine came in the door with votes and so why is

nothing being done about that i mean this is fraud and any way you look at it this is this is fraud any way you look at it and i i think it there are a number of reasons one has to do with the the the contributions that makes two to various to the various parties and also because again it tends to be a state issue and is isn't viewed in the national context it doesn't get the people in wyoming probably have very little concern about what's happening with voting machines in ohio so it hasn't taken on. on the national importance that it should let me ask you the same question roger i mean your organization has been sort of at the forefront of trying to deal with this issue talk you know technologically and also sort of bigger picture here on why nothing's changing what is actually i think a number of issues there's a reliability of these machines that doesn't necessarily involve any militias

attempted fraud there are certainly many opportunities by both insiders and outsiders to chambre with us elections the fact that we have outdated voting machines is certainly an issue but i think a much larger one is simply the lack of a good security culture in many of our election jurisdictions we're just not thinking like the bad guys and being prepared for a variety of different kinds of attacks we certainly have seen problems on the both voting machines but to be fair i think there's similar kinds of vulnerabilities associated with electronic voting machines made by other manufacturers as well and this is of course a good time to point out too we remember back in two thousand the hanging chads you know i always used to say well what about you know when i was in school we just took a test on those scan tron ballots and it took no time to run those through the machine get an accurate. count of what bubbles were circled and which weren't but what we i

know we saw with the hit with the punch chad controversy back in florida that that was a really big issue so what's the answer here roger. well i personally think an optical scan ballot where you as a voter fill out a very large ballot and then you walk up to the machine and personally feed it and in theory is the ultimate way to go in terms of having better security i don't believe that's currently secure we have many many other kinds of problems but if i had to choose a voting method that needed to be secured i would much prefer the optical scan approach than a touch screen or a push button machine or simply way more ways that that a malicious adversary can attack these types of voting machines and you know as professor van mentioned you know the technology is there but the deal is this is a lot of money when you talk about all the different polling places all around the country to update their equipment i want to speak a little bigger picture here i mean this has been

a fascinating year in terms of steps being taken to change the way that we vote in this country i'm talking about voter i.d. laws changes in early voting new laws for those who have served time in prison and when they can or can't vote we've done quite a few stories on this and i should mention many of these laws that were signed by republican governors have been blocked by the courts but what do you think what's your take professor and i mean what's going on here well in terms of voter id laws i've written on this i talk about this on this program is this is no more than an american coup d'etat this is the republican party trying to prevent legally registered voters primarily voters who are minority who are elderly and who are disabled from getting access to the ballot and the reason is because the trend within those demographics tends to be they vote democratic and in an election such is this two thousand and two thousand and twelve election where the margins just

naturally were going to be narrow the logic is the more people that they can dismiss from the voter rolls increases the possibility that mitt romney and then other. republican candidates in congressional races as well as senate in other state local elections. i would win roger let me ask you something in the news report we showed one to one of the people interviewed said even president obama you know is not speaking out against this even though this is been something that's affected people in his own party and any idea why you know people that you know you think would be speaking out are not well i'm just a security guy i'm not really a political analyst i would hope that having fair elections is something that really could be nonpartisan something that we all could get behind it's really it goes to the core of what this country in

a democracy is really about one of the one person total fairness in the election your vote should actually count so i think i'm a little disappointed when it becomes a partisan issue we all want to get behind them having honest elections you maybe just a security guy but that is that's a good answer i mean it does seem like something that everyone would want to be on the same page with and let me ask you professor and i know that the u.s. supreme court reconvene this week and one of the issues they're expected to take up is certain parts of the one nine hundred sixty five voting rights act. what what's going to happen here unfortunately it doesn't look good for the sixty five voting rights act. and it doesn't look good for affirmative action and this is where those in this country who are wondering why it is important vote the supreme court in who a president has the ability to nominate to the supreme court is one of the lasting

vestiges of any presidency and this is why again looking at the conservative shift on the court this is why it's important to understand who you're voting for to get out there and vote real quick we're almost out of time roger i just want to get your final take here in terms of security what should people know when they had to the polls in four and a half weeks. keep your eyes open if you see something that doesn't look right please speak up all right professor wilmer leon professor at howard university and also roger johnson head of the viral vulnerability asset team at the argonne national lab lab thanks guys so much less my pleasure. well despite it seeming like as the most important story in everyone's lives some voters are frankly starting to get bored by the lead up to the elections these days every diner in farming factory each candidate visits is breaking news and when president obama or governor romney are not on the air there's that twenty four seven spin cycle with everyone wanting to break down what each man meant by what he said while more harshness for the

residents at net talk to quite a few people who told her this election is becoming a snooze fest. the two thousand and twelve presidential election why were they so boring this week let's talk about that. so tired of all of it you know i mean it's almost like it's more than twenty four hours a day coverage on everything you know no matter what happens and nothing happens. having said that i think obama's going to win do you think he believes in himself as much as he did four years ago because he seems kind of tired he seems like he's a little frustrated i think he's more tired of. just all of this like he just wants to get it over to november just like ok give me you know let me when he says bored with the elections as we are very much president obama was the first african-american president that was so exciting no it's boring me i don't know if

there's going to be as much of a turnout for voters this year are you going to vote absolutely we're talking about the election you know. i mean. yeah we don't we don't let a lot of americans vote too apparently why do you want to run don't you think either candidate can get it done i think there's too much corruption in the government do you care who wins now really no i now because i don't i'm not fond of either one of them is that common right now across the country do you think i think so i mean this should be an. right. ship going to be a problem we're going to. there's no really a choice right it's one of the other and if but it's really a good option then what you did at the bush kerry kerry yeah i was just like i like which one do i like the least ok i'll use the other a vote of the other one yes so it's kind of the same thing as two thousand and four

that maybe it's just like one of those here the new times the new we need to support the people of your country is very important so is that what there is that what's missing this year neither of them are really speaking to the people yes forty seven percent that came from now the thirty percent thing they came from and . a lot of britons telling us that they don't care about it right at this point a month away from elections i feel like they just want to be to get it over with and they just want to hear more details on plans yeah and get it over with and get on with it and do something. because they do things up. there are the smart ones with all the millions of dollars do you think they get put on a better show. whether or not you think this election is boring the bottom line is we only have about a month until it's finally over and we can all gladly move on. all

right well that's going to do it for us for now but for more on the stories we covered go to youtube dot com slash r.t. america or check out our website r t dot com slash usa and you should follow me on twitter at christine. morning news today violence is once again flared up. these are the images the world has been seeing from the streets of canada. giant corporations are rooted a. culture is that so much as i mean anyone can wish of course he's right on economy

and so here it is to me going to be the first direct encounter between president obama and republican challenger mitt romney left the incumbent looking like road kill. you know how sometimes you see a story and it seems so for langley you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else and you hear or see some other part of it and realize that everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm tom harpur welcome to the big picture.